Okay, so I know it “a hyperactive baby” is correct, and “an occasionally delightful” is correct, but what do I do when I throw in parentheses? Should it be “a (occasionally) hyperactive” or “an (occasionally) hyperactive?”
Where’s my AP Stylebook? Right, at work. Fuck. (And why is it still there? It’s been well over five years since I had any role managing content.)
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You know, Google sucks for this kind of question.
Lisa has rejoined the blogging world with Mathias Eugene, a blog mostly about our son, but about other things as well. Right now its invite-only, so if you’re interested, send her an email.
Turkey Party 2007 has been bumped to November 10th. Details to follow.
Well, it’s about to be official at work, so it might as well be official here. The turkey in the freezer has a date on it. That date is Saturday, November 3rd.
FYI: I’ll go through and edit all of them later. Lots of link fixing, spelling crap and other issues to resolve.
(They changed rooms without telling anyone. I was 10 minutes late, but at least I had company.)
Jones: Does some prototyping by putting post-it notes on blocks of wood.
King: User testing for mobile (while person is texting while driving or whatever) is more difficult than watching someone us a PC.
Wilhelm: Have people walk around with a block and ask them what they’d like to do with that block.
Poisson: Clicks are gold. Saving an extra click, multiplied millions of customers, is a lot of effort saved. Used radar.net instead of .com because .net is easier to type on a mobile device.
King: Does a lot with click tracking as well.
Wilhelm: Assume a lot of upload failure and interruption when dealing with files. Make sure that kind of issue handling is built in from the start.
Poisson: You need to think about about time limits and attention span limits much more than you would on a desktop application.
Jones: Need to think of a three-second attention span. No clicking off rules and conditions screens.
King: Depends on what you need to do? Sending photos over SMS would suck.
Jones: It’s more about about the interraction between the cloud and the little thing you’re communicating with. More focus on connections to web services. Mobile makers kind of make the equivalent of a wiki stub asking themselves or others to fill it in later. By doing that pattern of stub-making gets you to open really interesting ideas.
King: Flash Lite is an excellent prototyping tool, but not ready for actual design yet.
Poisson: For applications, you can’t build once and use everywhere. You need to know going in you need to prep for a range of devices. Know the platforms your users use and try to build for them.
Wilhelm: deviceanywhere, etc. You can check out and test other phones online. Not 100% accurate, but better than buying every different model.
Jones: Look at the presentation by Brian Fling yesterday. (My notes from Fling’s presentation.) Get five or so varried phones, and test against them.
Wilhelm: Try to group devices and find similarities and then test against examples in those categories.
Poisson: Join developer networks from mobile manufacturers. Lots of good information from them.
Wilhelm: Off-deck: Distribution not managed by carrier. On-deck: Distribution by carrier. Off deck allows full-control of experience for user. Lots of pain to get on-deck. Some carriers have a lot of rules and regulations about what you can do in your application.
Poisson: Carriers still have some control when you’re off-deck. Just get your app out there, see what people want to do and go from there. If it works, carriers may come to you about tying your tool to their device.
Wilhelm: Maybe build teirs into your service.
King: Opera browser for mobile is great.
Jones: Look at what Fling said. Pare site down to attention-friendly components.
Jones: W3C Mobile Web Initiative… Plus developer networks. We’re still learning this stuff as we go. Look up small services blog.
Jane Jacobs died this morning at the age of 89. Her passing is an incredible loss for cities and those who care about them.
(And yes, I’m a bit weirded out by the fact that just yesterday I wrote a brief entry on The Death and Life of Great American Cities.)
“Monday Night Live” on MTN channel 16. I wish I had something to link to here. It’s basically a partially clothed couple on a couch, randomly kissing and massaging each other while taking crude phone calls from the Minneapolis viewing audience. “Would you like to rest your head in my robin’s nest?” WTF. “Does the hair cut off on the cheeks?” “No, it swirls in patches.” And then: “My guy has a raging boner and I’m going to blow him right here.” And finally: “How would you like a hot beef injection?”
I love Minneapolis public access, but this is even weirder than the guy preaching from the Segway.
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Update: MNL is followed by The Hemp Channel.
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